October 2, 2009
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Of rights and research, rats and undergrads
[JD 2455107.25]
PeTA2 recently gave a presentation on
the (alleged) horrible abuses of animals in scientific and medical
research. I wasn’t able to attend—I was leading a mass meeting of
the Secular Student Alliance at precisely the same time—but from
the pamphlets and flyers I saw, I have a pretty good idea of what the
presentation was about: Animals suffer in experiments, therefore
don’t use animals in experiments.
There are at least two deep flaws in
this line of argument: First, it is unequivocal that thousands of
human lives have been saved and millions improved by the knowledge
gained in animal research. In some cases there may have been other
ways of getting the same data, but in many cases this would have been
prohibitive in cost and time, and in some cases it would have
required us to cause the same kinds of suffering to
humans that PeTA2
objects to in rats and cats—or failing to do the research would
have allowed even worse suffering. Second, why target research? If
you’re really concerned about the rights and welfare of animals,
there is an elephant in the room: factory farming. Now,
it’s true that objecting to factory farming and objecting to animal
research are not mutually exclusive, but it’s a matter of strategy, a
matter of priorities: You can focus on animal research, and thereby
get a lot of scientists very angry and make yourselves look like
insane radicals; or you can focus on factory farming, and soon find
that you have allies all over the world—even people who see nothing
wrong with eating meat cannot help but be appalled by the squalor and
suffering of a CAFO.
On the
other hand, there are legitimate objections to be made against animal
research, at least certain kinds of animal research. As both a
scientist and animal rights activist, I feel more qualified than most
to address these issues.First,
it is said that animal research is founded upon a contradiction: For
our research to be valid, animals must be similar to us; but for our
research to be ethical, animals must not be
similar to us. How, then, can we justify animal research?I
think that biological and medical research can escape this
contradiction, by recognizing that many animals are biologically
similar to us without being
psychologically similar.
Anyone who would grant the same rights to an Aplysia or
a Drosophila as to a
Pan or a Homo
is frankly insane.But I
do not think psychological research can escape quite so easily. To
justify studying the brains of rats, we must presume that the brains
of rats are sufficiently similar to those of humans to warrant the
comparison. Yet to cut rats open and inject them with dangerous drugs
(cocaine and neurotoxins are not uncommon in rat experiments), we
must presume that the brains of rats are sufficiently different
that rats do not warrant the
same level of moral consideration—indeed, that they warrant very
little moral consideration at all, comparable to what we would give a
slug or a fly.Now,
there are indeed important differences and important similarities
between the human and rat brains, and perhaps they are of the sort
that would justify this kind of research—but I’m not so sure. Rats,
as mammals, have a well-developed telencephalon with many of the same
cerebral cortex areas as the human brain; but as far less intelligent
and far less social mammals, they use their cerebral cortex more than
anything else as a backup system in case their brain stem fails. A
cerebral stroke in a rat will cause minor impairment from which the
rat will eventually recover completely; the same stroke in a human
will cause severe permanent impairment and possibly even death. Thus,
rats are indeed both similar and different. But if rats depend so
little upon thecerebal cortex upon which humans depend so much, how
can we possibly hope to understand the one through the other?Furthermore,
there is the fact that we use rats for everything. If
we can find the time and funding, we might also use cats or chimps;
but we will definitely use rats, and in many cases we will use rats,
rats, rats right up until we start using humans. This is not
ethically but scientifically dubious—what
kind of data can we expect to get from such a limited sampling? If
the same results from rats also hold in cats and chimps, it seems
plausible to say they might hold in humans as well; but if all you’ve
ever tried are rats, rats, rats, how can you know? This is similar to
the problem in social psychology in which we use undergrads
for everything—undergrads are
of course perfectly human, but they are more White, more wealthy, and
by definition younger and more educated than the majority of people;
how much can we trust our conclusions about their moral values and
social behaviors? Rats and undergrads are convenient, but
surely that should be a lesser concern than scientific validity.Finally,
there is the issue of alternative methods. In
a seminal 1982 study, Ungerleider and Mishkin discovered the
relationship between the two primary pathways of visual data, the
spatial path in the parietal lobe, and the identity path in the
temporal lobe. This they did by training monkeys to perform specific
tasks (involving visual observation of spatial position and object
identity respectively), after surgically damaging half of the
monkeys’ parietal lobes and half of the monkeys’ temporal lobes. The
experiment was conducted flawlessly, the data are clearly
significant; but when I first learned of this experiment, I couldn’t
help but wonder: Why did they have to injure the
monkeys? Clearly they used monkeys so they wouldn’t have to injure
humans—clearly unethical—and also so they wouldn’t have to wait
for nature to injure humans on their behalf—what neurologists call
a “lesion study”, basically a case study of individuals who
happened to have suffered brain injury to specific areas. But why did
they have to injure anyone?
They could have used ice to cool the
monkeys’ brains in specific areas—or, if they’d waited a few years,
Barker was about to invent transcranial magnetic stimulation. The
monkeys would have very easily recovered from such
experiments—indeed, the experimenters probably could have used
humans, since the risks of short-term cooling and transcranial
magnetic stimulation are so minor. Instead, all those chimps suffered
permanent impairment because Ungerleider and Mishkin were lacking in
imagination.In
general, it seems to me that many scientists are too eager to perform
a straightforward but obviously harmful experiment upon animals,
rather than to wait and try to develop alternative means which will
be less harmful. If after significant time and effort no alternative
means can be devised, then perhaps it is necessary to harm some
animals in order to advance science and medicine; but this should be
a last resort, not the first and obvious step. The scientific
community is beginning to agree with me on this—as increasing
strictness in animal use guidelines attests—but the progress is too
slow, and too many animals are suffering needlessly in the interim.
